Fashion victim
I did a ton of laundry on Monday night and I realized that I have a ton of clothing. Way more than you might expect from someone who dresses the way I do. Among all of that clothing, the most common threads are probably band t-shirts (second most common are long-sleeve shirts with a single horizontal stripe. Although there are two that I tend to wear a lot, technically speaking I own at least half a dozen of these). I remember that during college Rob said his "thing," clothes-wise, was free t-shirts, because he had so many. Band t-shirts are far less cool than this as a "thing," but I've reconciled with the fact that they clearly are mine. Also, I can't bite Rob's style because my free t-shirts aren't as good. It would pretty much rest on that Time Machine shirt I got at a promo screening in 2002 (jealous?).
I like to think that my tastes evolve, but a lot of elements of my current tastes began with stuff I picked up in the mid-nineties, which means lately I've been in a constant state of realizing that I've been liking this or following that for upwards of a decade (for example, I bought my first They Might Be Giants album ten years ago this past April). It's a weird feeling. Even weirder when I think about how I've been keeping fairly complete LJ records of the movies and concerts I go to for over three years now, but there was so much time before that unchronicled. For example, there is no LJ entry that reads "tonight we got 23 people to go see Star Trek: First Contact. We rule." How sad for all of you! (Also consider: at the time, I was probably way closer to the average livejournaler age than I am now.)
Because I was thinking about all of this stuff on Monday night while folding a fuckload of clothes, I present to you now:
A Brief History of My Band… T-Shirts.
Yes, this took several days to write.
The Beatles (December 1995)
My mom got me a Let It Be t-shirt for Christmas. I wore it a lot playing Ultimate Frisbee and consequently it got pretty beat up. But I did love it and I'm curious about what happened to it.
Garbage (August 1996)
Oh yeh, I was badass with my pink-lettered black Garbage t-shirt. I'm pretty sure I got it at NRM, the music store in the mall that wasn't owned by TransWorld. I don't know what happened to this shirt, but I wore it pretty constantly in tenth and eleventh grade. Thinking about this shirt makes me want to go buy those last two Garbage albums I missed on half.com.
They Might Be Giants (part 1) (September 1996)
So my first TMBG concert was at the end of September, 1996. A bunch of us Saratoga kids went and we pretty much all got t-shirts immediately which means our high school class was (relatively) swimming with TMBG shirts for several years. Unfortunately, there weren't really enough different designs to go around, so there was some overlap -- Jeff and I both got the "World Tour 2040" one. If someone made a trivia game out of my life, all of the super-nerds would know which of my friends had which TMBG shirt designs (Rob: Hayseed Johns; Chris: "pearl"/face on the back/see below; Jason: long-sleeve sailor shirt).
The Cranberries (Spring 1997)
Not only was this a Cranberries shirt, but it was one of those crappy shirts that just has the album cover on it -- and not only was it a crappy album cover shirt, it was a crappy album cover shirt of To the Faithful Departed. I was actually really, really into To the Faithful Departed (you know, the one with "Salvation") at the time so it was pretty appropriate. This shirt is MIA but I kinda wish I still had it because I think it would be hilarious to wear it as a pajama shirt all the time.
Less Than Jake (July 1997)
I got this at my first Warped Tour and totally bought it because it the cheapest LTJ one there (seven dollars, I'm pretty sure). It depicts a happy family in a station wagon about to be hit with a bomb from above with the band's name lovingly etched on it. I've never technically seen another shirt like this but I have the vague feeling that it probably rips off about three-dozen other punk rock shirts.
Elastica (part 1) (Fall 1997)
Another album-art shirt courtesy of NRM, lovingly depicting the cover of the first Elastica record. This shirt met a sticky end (at least in terms of everyday wearability) at the Edgefest in Albany, NY, in June 1998, where it was covered in soda and dirt all day. Also, Rob got hit in the head with a bottle.
They Might Be Giants (parts 2 and 3) (September 1997/Spring 1998)
When I was younger, I used to really like wearing oversized shirts. I'm not sure exactly why. If I could talk to seventeen-year-old self, I'd say, dude, you will gain weight in college, there's no need to jump the gun on XXL shirts. (I guess it might be a better use of time-travel to say, dude, eat less pizza in college.) Anyway, when TMBG started selling a shirt in XXL, I was all over it. But the first time I wore it, I got it signed and consequently didn't want to re-wear it very often, so I bought another one at another concert. I only know the whereabouts of the unsigned one, though (both are too big to wear except to bed). Another item for the time-travel list.
Weezer (December 1997)
The dorkiest thing about this shirt (the color of the blue album with the dudes-standing image on the front -- so sort of an album-art shirt but better) is that I totally asked for a Weezer t-shirt for Christmas. The most awesome thing about this shirt is that I got more compliments on it from strangers than any item of clothing I've ever owned or probably will own, almost exclusively during the first half of college when Weezer were presumed missing/dead/broken up. I still have it, but it's full of holes, and the compliments post-Make Believe, if any, would probably only be bittersweet.
Oasis (Spring 1998)
Post-Be Here Now, an Oasis shirt at Hot Topic in Crossgates became surprisingly affordable. I actually just wore this last week.
Lincoln (1999)
Not the TMBG album, but the band half of whose members are now in TMBG. Jeff is so awesome that he actually made this shirt for me after Lincoln broke up and the chances of me getting a t-shirt celebrating their greatness were somewhat slim. I got a bunch of ink on it, but I still have it in my closet.
Elastica (parts 2 and 3) (Summer 1999)
In summer 1999, I worked for Reserve America, a company that handles campground reservations. So did Rob and Chris. Chris drove me to work most days so we had similar lunchtimes and would sometimes take trips, like to a mall (Clifton Country?) with a record store where I found several Elastica shirts, identical to the one I had recently ruined, for the low-low price of $3 apiece. I decided to get two, like Charlie Brown (I actually didn't have much cash on me at the time and I remember borrowing a couple of bucks from Chris to get both, and I don't know if I ever paid him back). You can debate over whether the fact that I only have one of my three identical Elastica shirts left is proof of a good idea, or a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Flaming Lips (August 1999)
This is actually one of the nicest-looking band shirts I've owned. It's a semi-psychedelic-looking picture of a dude running, and it's got a nice blue-yellow-green color scheme. I got it at my first Flaming Lips show in Boston for customary concert-shirt prices; a few years later, NRM was selling it for like five bucks. Oh well. The store did not survive to see a day when it would once again become acceptable to charge $20 for a Flaming Lips shirt. I still have mine, but it's got a big hole in the armpit.
Semisonic (January 2000)
This was another upstate-mall find, during winter break of my sophomore year in college. This and an Episode I shirt were like four dollars apiece. I'm pretty sure I still have the Semisonic one somewhere, but Episode I has been lost to the sands of time. Their albums may be hit and miss, but I sure like Semisonic's font.
Built to Spill (April 2000)
Another concert purchase, but not overpriced. Of the three Built to Spill live sets I've seen, this was the only really good one (at Toad's Place in New Haven, CT -- yes, very counter-intuitive), so now it seems appropriate that I have a souvenir. It's still in working order but I don't wear it very often, partially because I don't like BTS as much as I used to.
Catatonia (Summer 2000)
Catatonia is this chick-fronted Welsh band that was briefly big in the U.K. and never big in the U.S., but obviously they were huge with the me demo. I'm not sure how I came across Bluecat, a U.K. shirt merchant, but they had Catatonia shirts that were cheap enough in pounds to still be pretty cheap in U.S. dollars -- it came out to like fifteen bucks, and that was with overseas shipping. It says GRR! (and "Road Rage," which is one of Catatonia's songs; I'm not sure how I feel about song-specific shirts as they relate to album-specific or tour-specific shirts), and I still have it, and wear it once in awhile, but it's not really fit for public use. Now I will tell a story about exactly what I think of when I look at this shirt. That fall, around my birthday, my phone rang in the middle of the night. In general, I am incapable of not feeling disoriented and often terrified when this happens. I can go to bed knowing that I am going to get a phonecall later that night, and my first thought when the phone wakes me up is still AHHHH WHAT'S THAT NOISE?!?! I got myself together to answer the phone and no one responded on the other end which terrified even more. Then it happened again; terror increased. The phone may have rung a third time at which point I unplugged it and tried to go back to sleep as my terror subsided (very, very slowly). The next morning I had a voicemail. It was a message in that computerized Stephen Hawking stuff, saying a bunch of fragmentary things, and creeping me out, even in the light of morning. One sentence ended: "… with your Road Rage t-shirt on." And I totally was wearing my Road Rage t-shirt. For a few minutes, I was thoroughly convinced someone wanted me dead. I don't remember how, exactly, I figured out that it was Rob and Chris wishing me a happy birthday (most likely, they told me. I am not a detective). They had tried to make a robot-voice call go live, but they were having technical difficulties, and then I unplugged my phone so they left a message. This seems like a rational explanation except that Rob and Chris were several hours away from Wesleyan, so how did they know I was wearing my Catatonia shirt? I asked Rob about this, and he explained, with nonchalance, that of course they knew I was wearing that shirt, because I was always wearing that shirt. Touche, Rob.
Sleater-Kinney (part 1) (October 2002)
Sleater-Kinney shirts have a weird animal fixation. At the farewell-NYC tour, the only shirt had a dog on it. On the website, the only shirt available before the store shuts down for good has a horse on it. Last year, one of their main designs featured a drawing of a cat. This makes me all the luckier that I got ahold of one with a monkey. It's a monkey holding an olive branch, which makes me feel a lot more peaceful than a dove. Birds are gross.
They Might Be Giants (part 4) (late 2002?)
I'm not sure when this happened, but Chris gave me the "pearl" TMBG shirt he got at the show back in 1996. Presumably because it doesn't fit him -- Chris, the shirt is big on me so I can only imagine how you would've been swimming in it; why on earth did you get an XL?
Palomar (February 2003)
I first saw Palomar as the opening act for Rainer Maria/Mates of State. Now I like them way more than Rainer Maria or Mates of State. A month after that first show, I went to one of their own shows with my friend Megan, and they had a deal where you could get a CD and a t-shirt for $15 total. Because I wanted what Palomar themselves referred to as the "dumb" style (the one that says MY GIRLFRIEND IS IN PALOMAR -- this is a lie, by the way), I had to settle for a medium, which makes this actually the tightest (and most emo?) t-shirt I own. It's OK because Palomar is my most-loved local band (the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Strokes don't count) (and Palomar is better than the Strokes).
Rilo Kiley (August 2004)
As you might gather from the Weezer entry, I don't get a lot of compliments about clothes. In fact, if Rob ever says "nice shirt" around me, it is virtually guaranteed that he's actually talking to Marisa. However, when I was interning at a literary agency, the more outwardly stylish of the two agents told me he liked this shirt -- and purely aesthetically, since he had never heard of the band. Anyway, if you've seen me more than twice in the past two years, odds are you've seen this shirt. It's one of my favorites, but it's getting physically worn out. I'm washing it a lot in hopes of keeping it from going the way of the Catatonia shirt.
The Pixies (December 2004)
I'm usually not so into the "tour shirt," you know, with the dates and locations on the back, but it worked for me in this case because it really was a big deal at the time that I got to see the Pixies on their big reunion tour. Now they've been a functioning nostalgia act for about two years, so it seems kind of silly. But still, it's a Pixies shirt and I love it. Also, every other time I've wanted to get a band shirt from someone playing Hammerstein (White Stripes, Blur), it was ridiculously overpriced, and the Pixies stuff wasn't, despite allegedly commemorating a momentous occasion, so good for them.
Sleater-Kinney (part 2) (March 2005)
S-K had a website sale last year, so I got an extra shirt to put me more at peace with the fact that the monkey shirt's wearability is growing more questionable. I will say this: American Apparel clothes usually strike me as plain, overpriced, and generally overrated, but this AA-based S-K shirt is both softer and sturdier than most of my other band shirts. This is another one where you've probably seen me wearing it because I wear it all the damn time (it's the shirt with the bridge on it).
The Mountain Goats (October 2005)
This is also a "tour"-style shirt, but I got the impression -- since it was hardly a massive world tour in effect and there isn't a lot of merch online -- that the Mountain Goats change up their shirts a lot, tour by tour, which is very cool and hopefully puts a lot of different Mountain Goats shirts out there into the world.
They Might Be Giants (part 5) (December 2005)
Finally, a shirt that combines my love of TMBG with my love of old-timey presidents. I had misgivings about this design because it was bit from their website, but it captures of the TMBG style pretty perfectly.
The Hold Steady (July 2006)
Sure, I replaced the Sleater-Kinney monkey shirt with another Sleater-Kinney shirt… but what of the monkey?! The Hold Steady to the rescue. Welcome to shirt I wear all the time: the next generation.
I like to think that my tastes evolve, but a lot of elements of my current tastes began with stuff I picked up in the mid-nineties, which means lately I've been in a constant state of realizing that I've been liking this or following that for upwards of a decade (for example, I bought my first They Might Be Giants album ten years ago this past April). It's a weird feeling. Even weirder when I think about how I've been keeping fairly complete LJ records of the movies and concerts I go to for over three years now, but there was so much time before that unchronicled. For example, there is no LJ entry that reads "tonight we got 23 people to go see Star Trek: First Contact. We rule." How sad for all of you! (Also consider: at the time, I was probably way closer to the average livejournaler age than I am now.)
Because I was thinking about all of this stuff on Monday night while folding a fuckload of clothes, I present to you now:
A Brief History of My Band… T-Shirts.
Yes, this took several days to write.
The Beatles (December 1995)
My mom got me a Let It Be t-shirt for Christmas. I wore it a lot playing Ultimate Frisbee and consequently it got pretty beat up. But I did love it and I'm curious about what happened to it.
Garbage (August 1996)
Oh yeh, I was badass with my pink-lettered black Garbage t-shirt. I'm pretty sure I got it at NRM, the music store in the mall that wasn't owned by TransWorld. I don't know what happened to this shirt, but I wore it pretty constantly in tenth and eleventh grade. Thinking about this shirt makes me want to go buy those last two Garbage albums I missed on half.com.
They Might Be Giants (part 1) (September 1996)
So my first TMBG concert was at the end of September, 1996. A bunch of us Saratoga kids went and we pretty much all got t-shirts immediately which means our high school class was (relatively) swimming with TMBG shirts for several years. Unfortunately, there weren't really enough different designs to go around, so there was some overlap -- Jeff and I both got the "World Tour 2040" one. If someone made a trivia game out of my life, all of the super-nerds would know which of my friends had which TMBG shirt designs (Rob: Hayseed Johns; Chris: "pearl"/face on the back/see below; Jason: long-sleeve sailor shirt).
The Cranberries (Spring 1997)
Not only was this a Cranberries shirt, but it was one of those crappy shirts that just has the album cover on it -- and not only was it a crappy album cover shirt, it was a crappy album cover shirt of To the Faithful Departed. I was actually really, really into To the Faithful Departed (you know, the one with "Salvation") at the time so it was pretty appropriate. This shirt is MIA but I kinda wish I still had it because I think it would be hilarious to wear it as a pajama shirt all the time.
Less Than Jake (July 1997)
I got this at my first Warped Tour and totally bought it because it the cheapest LTJ one there (seven dollars, I'm pretty sure). It depicts a happy family in a station wagon about to be hit with a bomb from above with the band's name lovingly etched on it. I've never technically seen another shirt like this but I have the vague feeling that it probably rips off about three-dozen other punk rock shirts.
Elastica (part 1) (Fall 1997)
Another album-art shirt courtesy of NRM, lovingly depicting the cover of the first Elastica record. This shirt met a sticky end (at least in terms of everyday wearability) at the Edgefest in Albany, NY, in June 1998, where it was covered in soda and dirt all day. Also, Rob got hit in the head with a bottle.
They Might Be Giants (parts 2 and 3) (September 1997/Spring 1998)
When I was younger, I used to really like wearing oversized shirts. I'm not sure exactly why. If I could talk to seventeen-year-old self, I'd say, dude, you will gain weight in college, there's no need to jump the gun on XXL shirts. (I guess it might be a better use of time-travel to say, dude, eat less pizza in college.) Anyway, when TMBG started selling a shirt in XXL, I was all over it. But the first time I wore it, I got it signed and consequently didn't want to re-wear it very often, so I bought another one at another concert. I only know the whereabouts of the unsigned one, though (both are too big to wear except to bed). Another item for the time-travel list.
Weezer (December 1997)
The dorkiest thing about this shirt (the color of the blue album with the dudes-standing image on the front -- so sort of an album-art shirt but better) is that I totally asked for a Weezer t-shirt for Christmas. The most awesome thing about this shirt is that I got more compliments on it from strangers than any item of clothing I've ever owned or probably will own, almost exclusively during the first half of college when Weezer were presumed missing/dead/broken up. I still have it, but it's full of holes, and the compliments post-Make Believe, if any, would probably only be bittersweet.
Oasis (Spring 1998)
Post-Be Here Now, an Oasis shirt at Hot Topic in Crossgates became surprisingly affordable. I actually just wore this last week.
Lincoln (1999)
Not the TMBG album, but the band half of whose members are now in TMBG. Jeff is so awesome that he actually made this shirt for me after Lincoln broke up and the chances of me getting a t-shirt celebrating their greatness were somewhat slim. I got a bunch of ink on it, but I still have it in my closet.
Elastica (parts 2 and 3) (Summer 1999)
In summer 1999, I worked for Reserve America, a company that handles campground reservations. So did Rob and Chris. Chris drove me to work most days so we had similar lunchtimes and would sometimes take trips, like to a mall (Clifton Country?) with a record store where I found several Elastica shirts, identical to the one I had recently ruined, for the low-low price of $3 apiece. I decided to get two, like Charlie Brown (I actually didn't have much cash on me at the time and I remember borrowing a couple of bucks from Chris to get both, and I don't know if I ever paid him back). You can debate over whether the fact that I only have one of my three identical Elastica shirts left is proof of a good idea, or a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Flaming Lips (August 1999)
This is actually one of the nicest-looking band shirts I've owned. It's a semi-psychedelic-looking picture of a dude running, and it's got a nice blue-yellow-green color scheme. I got it at my first Flaming Lips show in Boston for customary concert-shirt prices; a few years later, NRM was selling it for like five bucks. Oh well. The store did not survive to see a day when it would once again become acceptable to charge $20 for a Flaming Lips shirt. I still have mine, but it's got a big hole in the armpit.
Semisonic (January 2000)
This was another upstate-mall find, during winter break of my sophomore year in college. This and an Episode I shirt were like four dollars apiece. I'm pretty sure I still have the Semisonic one somewhere, but Episode I has been lost to the sands of time. Their albums may be hit and miss, but I sure like Semisonic's font.
Built to Spill (April 2000)
Another concert purchase, but not overpriced. Of the three Built to Spill live sets I've seen, this was the only really good one (at Toad's Place in New Haven, CT -- yes, very counter-intuitive), so now it seems appropriate that I have a souvenir. It's still in working order but I don't wear it very often, partially because I don't like BTS as much as I used to.
Catatonia (Summer 2000)
Catatonia is this chick-fronted Welsh band that was briefly big in the U.K. and never big in the U.S., but obviously they were huge with the me demo. I'm not sure how I came across Bluecat, a U.K. shirt merchant, but they had Catatonia shirts that were cheap enough in pounds to still be pretty cheap in U.S. dollars -- it came out to like fifteen bucks, and that was with overseas shipping. It says GRR! (and "Road Rage," which is one of Catatonia's songs; I'm not sure how I feel about song-specific shirts as they relate to album-specific or tour-specific shirts), and I still have it, and wear it once in awhile, but it's not really fit for public use. Now I will tell a story about exactly what I think of when I look at this shirt. That fall, around my birthday, my phone rang in the middle of the night. In general, I am incapable of not feeling disoriented and often terrified when this happens. I can go to bed knowing that I am going to get a phonecall later that night, and my first thought when the phone wakes me up is still AHHHH WHAT'S THAT NOISE?!?! I got myself together to answer the phone and no one responded on the other end which terrified even more. Then it happened again; terror increased. The phone may have rung a third time at which point I unplugged it and tried to go back to sleep as my terror subsided (very, very slowly). The next morning I had a voicemail. It was a message in that computerized Stephen Hawking stuff, saying a bunch of fragmentary things, and creeping me out, even in the light of morning. One sentence ended: "… with your Road Rage t-shirt on." And I totally was wearing my Road Rage t-shirt. For a few minutes, I was thoroughly convinced someone wanted me dead. I don't remember how, exactly, I figured out that it was Rob and Chris wishing me a happy birthday (most likely, they told me. I am not a detective). They had tried to make a robot-voice call go live, but they were having technical difficulties, and then I unplugged my phone so they left a message. This seems like a rational explanation except that Rob and Chris were several hours away from Wesleyan, so how did they know I was wearing my Catatonia shirt? I asked Rob about this, and he explained, with nonchalance, that of course they knew I was wearing that shirt, because I was always wearing that shirt. Touche, Rob.
Sleater-Kinney (part 1) (October 2002)
Sleater-Kinney shirts have a weird animal fixation. At the farewell-NYC tour, the only shirt had a dog on it. On the website, the only shirt available before the store shuts down for good has a horse on it. Last year, one of their main designs featured a drawing of a cat. This makes me all the luckier that I got ahold of one with a monkey. It's a monkey holding an olive branch, which makes me feel a lot more peaceful than a dove. Birds are gross.
They Might Be Giants (part 4) (late 2002?)
I'm not sure when this happened, but Chris gave me the "pearl" TMBG shirt he got at the show back in 1996. Presumably because it doesn't fit him -- Chris, the shirt is big on me so I can only imagine how you would've been swimming in it; why on earth did you get an XL?
Palomar (February 2003)
I first saw Palomar as the opening act for Rainer Maria/Mates of State. Now I like them way more than Rainer Maria or Mates of State. A month after that first show, I went to one of their own shows with my friend Megan, and they had a deal where you could get a CD and a t-shirt for $15 total. Because I wanted what Palomar themselves referred to as the "dumb" style (the one that says MY GIRLFRIEND IS IN PALOMAR -- this is a lie, by the way), I had to settle for a medium, which makes this actually the tightest (and most emo?) t-shirt I own. It's OK because Palomar is my most-loved local band (the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Strokes don't count) (and Palomar is better than the Strokes).
Rilo Kiley (August 2004)
As you might gather from the Weezer entry, I don't get a lot of compliments about clothes. In fact, if Rob ever says "nice shirt" around me, it is virtually guaranteed that he's actually talking to Marisa. However, when I was interning at a literary agency, the more outwardly stylish of the two agents told me he liked this shirt -- and purely aesthetically, since he had never heard of the band. Anyway, if you've seen me more than twice in the past two years, odds are you've seen this shirt. It's one of my favorites, but it's getting physically worn out. I'm washing it a lot in hopes of keeping it from going the way of the Catatonia shirt.
The Pixies (December 2004)
I'm usually not so into the "tour shirt," you know, with the dates and locations on the back, but it worked for me in this case because it really was a big deal at the time that I got to see the Pixies on their big reunion tour. Now they've been a functioning nostalgia act for about two years, so it seems kind of silly. But still, it's a Pixies shirt and I love it. Also, every other time I've wanted to get a band shirt from someone playing Hammerstein (White Stripes, Blur), it was ridiculously overpriced, and the Pixies stuff wasn't, despite allegedly commemorating a momentous occasion, so good for them.
Sleater-Kinney (part 2) (March 2005)
S-K had a website sale last year, so I got an extra shirt to put me more at peace with the fact that the monkey shirt's wearability is growing more questionable. I will say this: American Apparel clothes usually strike me as plain, overpriced, and generally overrated, but this AA-based S-K shirt is both softer and sturdier than most of my other band shirts. This is another one where you've probably seen me wearing it because I wear it all the damn time (it's the shirt with the bridge on it).
The Mountain Goats (October 2005)
This is also a "tour"-style shirt, but I got the impression -- since it was hardly a massive world tour in effect and there isn't a lot of merch online -- that the Mountain Goats change up their shirts a lot, tour by tour, which is very cool and hopefully puts a lot of different Mountain Goats shirts out there into the world.
They Might Be Giants (part 5) (December 2005)
Finally, a shirt that combines my love of TMBG with my love of old-timey presidents. I had misgivings about this design because it was bit from their website, but it captures of the TMBG style pretty perfectly.
The Hold Steady (July 2006)
Sure, I replaced the Sleater-Kinney monkey shirt with another Sleater-Kinney shirt… but what of the monkey?! The Hold Steady to the rescue. Welcome to shirt I wear all the time: the next generation.